City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 5-2019 School Optimism: Fast Life and Slow Debt in the Financialized University Mark Alan Porter Webb The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3130 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY) Contact: AcademicWorks@cuny.edu SCHOOL OPTIMISM: FAST LIFE AND SLOW DEBT IN THE FINANCIALIZED UNIVERSITY by Mark Alan Porter Webb A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2019 © 2019 MARK ALAN PORTER WEBB All Rights Reserved ii School Optimism: Fast Life and Slow Debt in the Financialized University by Mark Alan Porter Webb This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date Jeff Maskovsky Chair of Examining Committee Date Jeff Maskovsky Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Jeff Maskovsky Leith Mullings Don Robotham iii THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK School Optimism: Fast Life and Slow Debt in the Financialized University by Mark Alan Porter Webb Advisor: Jeff Maskovsky Over the past two decades, educational debt has quickly transformed US colleges and universities into spaces of cruel optimism: the higher education that students desire is all too often an obstacle to their flourishing This study maps the contours of the white, middle-class attachment to the college dream, paying particular attention to the moments when the optimism surrounding higher education turns cruel As this optimism wanes in the face of mounting educational debt, students deploy a myriad of fast life strategies—a flurry of actions that include work, activism, protest, leaving school and/or satirical critique—with the hope of mitigating the impact of looming debt repayment iv Table of Contents Introduction Financialization, Financial Expropriation, and Fast Life Calculated Risk Versus Radical Uncertainty The White, Professional, College Attachment 10 Overview of Field Site: New York University 16 Data Collection Methods 19 Argument and Chapter Summaries 22 Chapter 1//The Financialization of Higher Education 26 Origins 28 Growth 32 Tension 35 Crisis 37 Corporatization 41 Financialization 48 Chapter 2//School Optimism 55 Pull 61 Push 65 School Optimism 73 Chapter 3//Cruel Attachments 77 Promises 79 Loans 81 Affect 86 Stress 91 Disparity 96 Family 101 Cruel Attachments 106 Chapter 4//Fast Life 108 Work 109 Support 117 Protest 121 Drop-Out 128 Satirize 130 Fast Life 133 v Conclusion//Slow Debt 141 Indentured Studenthood? 148 Toward Radical Detachment 153 Bibliography 158 vi Introduction Over the past two decades, educational debt has quickly transformed US colleges and universities into spaces of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism: the higher education that students desire is all too often an obstacle to their flourishing In recent years, educational loans surpassed credit card and automobile debt to become the largest source of US debt after home mortgages (Brown et al 2015) Over forty-four million US Americans now hold nearly 1.5 trillion dollars in federal educational debt (Student Loan Hero 2018) Equally alarming is the inability of these debtors to make loan repayments consistently According to recent statistics, nearly 45 percent of the twenty-two million student debtors with federal student loans up for repayment are not making regular contributions towards their debt Nearly four million have not made a payment in over 360 days and are in default Another three million are at least a month behind on their payment and considered delinquent Still another three million have officially postponed repayment by either showing economic hardship and declaring forbearance, or deferring their loan repayment to return to school or engage in some other form of formal training (Mitchell 2016) Amidst rising tuition and diminishing government aid, the cruelly optimistic double bind of educational debt is changing the university experience for segments of the population previously protected from economic stress What for decades had been a rite of passage for much of the US white middle-class, has now become, in the Berlantian sense, a moment of impasse where traditionally privileged students scramble to recalibrate their present lives in relation to the uncertainty of their financial futures To capture the transition of the university experience from passage to impasse, this dissertation examines the affect of white middle-class student debtors at New York University (NYU) While each student has their own unique story, the NYU students that participated in this study collectively revealed a shared set of embodied experiences: the deep longing of leaving home to attend a prestigious university; the celebratory exhilaration of opening the acceptance letter; the initial nonchalance of signing on to large sums of debt; the simultaneous feelings of heartache and liberation of saying goodbye to family members who hold great expectations for their success in school; the gut-punch of the realization that student debt must someday be repaid with interest; and the ongoing shame and anxiety of living with debt when others around you not Focusing on the affect of these key moments, as well as the smaller, more ordinary ones that rest in between, allows for a careful study of the relationship between the ongoing development of raced and classed subjects, and the broader and everchanging economic, political, and cultural contexts in which they act and interact In the words of Sarah Ahmed, affect helps identify “how bodies turn towards things” (2010, 31) In highlighting the specific ways that indebted student’s encounter shifting politicaleconomic and cultural forces today, this dissertation deploys and develops Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to gain insight into the nuance and complexity of contemporary capitalism’s increasingly financialized forms of life The college dream has been integral to the fabric of white middle-class livelihoods (at least) since the GI bill propelled millions of predominantly white, male, World War II veterans into stable jobs, home ownership and higher education (Katznelson 2005; Brodkin 1998) This dream is an illuminating example of the affective force of optimism, which following Berlant, optimism reveals itself in the form of tightly held attachments (2011, 13) These attachments, in turn, manifest themselves as diverse “structures of relationality” (ibid.), that is, as varied forms of emotional and bodily expression as people find ways to maintain the continuity of their hopes and aspirations amidst change, crisis, and upheaval All attachments are inherently optimistic (Berlant 2011, 23), and the college dream especially so For the white middle-class students featured in this study—many of whom are idealistic, politically progressive, artistically inclined, and with parents and grandparents who also have a university degree—college represents both the possibility for continued upward social and economic mobility, as well as the chance to escape the stifling and at times oppressive doldrums of one’s hometown to seek personal growth and self-actualization This makes the double bind of student debt even crueler On the one hand, upward mobility and individual growth through higher education become complicated and uncertain by looming debt repayment; on the other hand, and despite its rapidly diminishing returns, the college dream has been such a defining and sustaining attachment within their lives that it seems impossible to imagine themselves going on without it Letting go of this dream feels more difficult and damaging than the decision to take on debt to make it possible Berlant (2011, 14), however, is quick to remind us that attachments, no matter how cruel, are not a matter of human error, naivety, or irrationality While many of the white middle-class debtors in this study did not fully understand the terms of their loans, the way compound interest would cause their debt to grow exponentially, or the emotionally embodied burden that would accompany the indebted life, ignorance or manipulation are not the main reason that these debtors took on student loans Rather it was the way that the attachment to the college dream acts as a “cluster of promises” (Berlant 2011, 23): the promise of the university experience, of going off on one’s own, of obtaining or maintaining a presence within the professional sectors of society This attachment is thus a host of promises that bind these students to a specific, and increasingly cruel trajectory In light of the driving force of the college dream, the lack of knowledge held by many white middle-class student’s about the details of their loans—read of an anti-racist, anti-capitalist society, and anti-patriarchal17 society This means more than just knowing about oppression, exploitation, and expropriation—which many progressive PWWC people already do—but deeply examining how our very understandings of ourselves, our hopes, and our wellbeing are tied up in our attachment to an expectation of the so-called “middle-class” good life This is by no means easy; attachments are cruel because abandoning ship often feels harder than staying the course, even when your vessel has started to take on water The participants in this study have shown that humor and satire are often good places to start critical self-reflection In making fun of ourselves and our inability to let go of what we have been promised and believe we deserve, we of the PWWC can identify our attachments as a place where consent is both given, and presumably can be revoked We begin to pry away at the captivating feeling that the way we live is the only way we could possibly live The affective genres of financial stress that increasingly consume us as our material realities contradict our material aspirations become less of a paralyzing burden and more of an impetus to feel, think and live differently The impasse of future debt repayment becomes a collective platform for radical, transformative action 17 While sex and gender oppression have not been the focus of this dissertation, the sexed and gendered consequences of the attachment to the college dream could be the topic of its own dissertation Women have made “dramatic gains” regarding access to higher education over the past six decades Composing a mere 24% of the undergraduate student population in 1950, women were nearly 60% of that population by the year 2000 Starting in 2006, women were earning the majority of degrees at all levels of higher education (Miller 2017, 9) The dramatic increase in women’s access to higher education over the past six decades corresponds directly with an era of rising tuition, decreasing government support for education, and stagnating wages (Miller 2017, 9-14) So while women made up 56% of all college students in 2016 (Ibid., 1), they now hold an estimated 833 billion of the nearly 1.5 trillion dollars that US Americans now owe in student debt (Ibid., 36) Furthermore, the fact that women continue to make around eighty-cents to the dollar that men earn on the same job (Ibid., 28) means that it takes them nearly two more years than men to pay off their debts (Ibid., 35) In this context, the fast-life responses that some PWWC women enact at NYU—most notably domestic work as nannies and intimate relationships with wealthy male benefactors in exchange for money, gifts, and social and professional connections—merit further study 155 Much work is already being done to convert the oppression of student debt into a site of new possibility The organization, Strike Debt, with roots in the Occupy Wall Street global uprising is leading the way in terms of national struggles around student debt Their mobilization of Corinthian College debtors into a bloc of debt strikers helped win the cancellation of close to thirty million dollars in debt for over 1,300 students (Popularresistance.org 2015) They continue their campaign of rolling jubilee where they raise money to purchase debt that has been bundled together as a financial instrument and now being sold for pennies on the dollar To this date they have raised over seventy thousand dollars and abolished nearly thirty-two million dollars in consumer debt in the US (Rolling Jubilee 2018) Debt strike and erasure are key tools in debt resistance work, but neither ensure an escape from the current attachment to the college dream Like struggling for higher wages or lower tuition, they are important and necessary acts that, alone, are not complete answers to the problem at hand Rather than just refusing to pay our debts or working collectively to pay the debts of those who cannot, we must also be working to create alternative economic, political, and educational institutions to which we can attach ourselves and our desires for the good lives that all human beings deserve Countless others have expounded upon what those alternatives might be, the challenge remains in building the bridge between the world we have and the world we want One powerful action for progressive sectors of the PWWC would be to begin to collectivize our surplus resources In fact, a massive debt repayment strike, accompanied by the collectivization of a significant portion of the money that would have been paid to capitalist financiers, would help mobilize the resources needed to organize working people across color lines to create an alternative foundation for the world in which we wish to live, work, and study 156 Numerous possibilities emerge when we begin to the hard work of recognizing and moving beyond our cruel attachments to a college dream bound up in a longer history of racialized inequality—a college dream that is also now an integral part of capitalist expansion and financial expropriation The fast life and slow debt of the cruel, college attachment is not 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financialization of the. .. NYU Gallatin Student and professor, and the weekly meetings of the Gallatin Student Debt Collective that emerged out of the Life and Debt series during the 2016 spring semester Within these three... uncertain by looming debt repayment; on the other hand, and despite its rapidly diminishing returns, the college dream has been such a defining and sustaining attachment within their lives that